As we had a training day on the Wednesday we missed out on our usual lesson time, so on the Thursday, we got the pleasure of doing a full days work experience with the theatre company Blah Blah Blah (http://www.blahs.co.uk/)
They specialise in doing Theatre in Education. In the particular performance they were doing for a group of year 8’s and a group of year 10’s they were looking at The Gunpowder Plot. They looked into parts of the priests hiding from the banning of Catholics. Not only is there production acting using direct address, but they got the children to take part to make it clear they understood what they were trying to teach as well as making it more entertaining. Overall there performance was around 1 hour 40 minutes. I will be putting up a video with parts of the performance that I thought were the best.
We arrived at 8am to help unload the theatre company’s van and unload it into the performance area. As there location of performance is constantly changing on a daily basis it was great to see there set and how something that was bigger than I expected in scale was whilst not put together and then how it was all assembled. We helped set out the chairs for 40 pupils, and it fit the circle setting which also worked as a stage. There was also an spacing in the centre so a pathway was made to the back where there was a drum. As the cast was made up of 4 actors, there were often doubling for characters and there costumes were often put on at the side of the stage in audiences view as well as having to do this very quickly it manage to not distract from the overall performance and they did it very smoothly with no complications.
I thought it was clever how they did a 2012 date, so it was like they were taking the students back in time and therefore engaged them from the very start of the performance.
This is one of the Priest holds and I think they managed to include it into the set very cleverly.
The on stage dressing room where there was also a drum similar to the one placed at the back and they incorporated the drum beats very well in their performance.
Throughout the day we were told we were allowed to ask as many questions as we liked. Especially once we’d seen the performance we could ask many more questions. I will also be uploading a video of the conversations we had. This gave us much more of an insight of how they decide on what they do and how often and such.
No comments:
Post a Comment